DATE: 7 p.m. March 27, 2008.

EVENT: “Where Fate Will Fling Us: First Person Accounts of My Family’s Holocaust Experience in Letters, 1938-1946” is an illustrated public lecture by University of Michigan School of Information associate professor Victor Rosenberg. Rosenberg will tell his family’s story through more than 100 letters and postcards from Nazi forced labor camps. The correspondence was received by Rosenberg’s father Alfred Rosenberg from relatives in camps at Gurs in the Pyrenees, Vichy, France and other locations in Europe and British Mandate Palestine from 1938-1946.

A Jewish family from Breisach, Germany, ran small hardware and peddling businesses for many decades until the onset of the anti-Semitic persecution by the Third Reich. These letters tell the story of what the family members experienced in that period: from Alfred and his wife’s fortunate flight to safety in the United States to the suffering of their parents and less fortunate relations in Breisach and Freiburg, from the burning of the synagogue to the transportation of a father and son to Dachau, the evacuation of the population of Breisach and the subsequent deportation to Gurs.

This exchange of letters not only gives an account of the events, but a close examination at what the victims themselves experienced. By revealing the ordeal of the Rosenberg family during those years, this is also the story of all the victims of Nazi persecution, centered on one family from one region in Germany.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be available.

PLACE: Room 100 of U-M Hatcher Graduate Library, Central Campus, Ann Arbor.

SPONSOR: University Library.

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